Grand High Witch (The Witches)
The Grand High Witch '''(or the '''Grand High Witch of All the World), also known as 'Eva Ernst '(Miss / Baroness Ernst), is the main villain of the children's fantasy book The Witches. She is an all-powerful and particularly terrible leader of all the witches anywhere, who hides her age and extreme ugliness, and whom the heroes must find a way to destroy if they can have any chance to exterminate her evil kind. In the 1990 film adaptation she was played by Anjelica Huston. Story The story begins with a young boy Luke, who is visiting an English seaside hotel with his grandmother Helga Eveshim, who has become his guardian. His grandmother tells him how there are secret societies of cruel and child-hating witches secretly existing all over world, and in her younger years she was one of the very best of the witch hunters and has travelled all over the globe trying to track down the Grand High Witch. On the arrival, Luke makes friends with another young boy named Bruno Jenkins. At the hotel, a group of distinguished ladies from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children arrive for an annual convention. Their leader is a mysterious, attractive, snobbish, foreign aristocrat named Eva Ernst, who flirts with Bruno's father right in front of his wife. However, soon Luke finds out that Eva is indeed the frightening Grand High Witch, a very old crone who rules all the witches on earth. It is revealed that she hides her horrifically deformed face and rotting body under a rubber mask and suit to look beautiful. All other witches are terrified of her unlimited power, ruthlessness and cruelty. In the past, she also faced off against Luke's grandmother Helga. The supposed convention of kind ladies itself is in reality a meeting of the local witch coven where they will be given an order to distribute a magic potion called the Formula 86 that will turn all children in England into mice. The Grand High Witch sadistically demonstrates her plot by inviting Bruno into the convention and having him eat a chocolate with her formula in it, making him slowly turn into a mouse. Luke has been secretly watching this event, and is caught and brought to the Grand High Witch. Luke is force fed the formula too, which turned him into a mouse as well. The two bewitched boys (mice) manage to escape to Helga's room, and develop a plan to stop the witches. Evading the Grand High Witch's cat Liebschen, they steal the magic formula, and slip it into the witches' own soup. In the end, the Grand High Witch suffers a somewhat fitting demise when her own magic is used against her and her followers. They are all transformed into mice with black-and-white fur, except the Grand High Witch, who is last to be affected, possibly because of her sheer power, and turns into a nasty hairless rat. With the mice-witches running around to flee, chaos and panic ensues, and the hotel staff members begin to massacre them. "Her Grandness" herself is captured under a glass pitcher and sliced in half with a cleaver by the hotel manager. The book ends with Luke's and Helga's plan to quickly do the same at the Grand High Witch's Castle in Norway (infiltrate it, turn her successor and large retinue of special Assistant Witches into mice, and release cats to kill them), and then to use her magic items and contact informations to systematically find and wipe all the witches in the world, one by one. In the film version, the Grand High Witch's not-so-evil-after-all assistant Anne Irvine, who was abused by her and has been spared by the heroes, restores Luke to human form, and gives him a trunk load of her late boss's money and a black book containing the names of addresses of every witch in the United States. In the book, Eva is described as "the most evil and appalling woman in the world," "without mercy" and utterly detesting children. Impatient, arrogant, volatile, aggressive and tyrannical, she does not care how her commands are carried out, just so long as they are obeyed. In previous meetings, the Grand High Witch made it a custom to casually murder one of her own followers simply to keep the other witches fearful of her, and now she does it by frying a young witch named Beatrice using only her magical gaze. Meanwhile, "Nobody in the world had the faintest idea who she was except the other witches. Wherever she went, people simply knew her as a nice lady. (...) Even in her home district, in the village where she lived, people knew her as a kindly and very wealthy Baroness who gave large sums of money to charity." Trivia *Anjelica Huston appeared as the evil step-mother Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent in the 1998 film Ever After. *Anjelica Huston appeared as Miss Harridan in the 2003 film Daddy Day Care. Gallery File:600full-the-witches-poster.jpg Screenshot 8573.png Eva_Ernst.png 64a363f0fb274aae81b8851d8ed.jpg The-Witches-anjelica-huston-39079144-500-429.gif eca44aea-b9cc-44e2-b51e-77d96a7c0236.jpg anigif_enhanced-15146-1413901757-8.gif anim_2620c91c-000f-7d44-094d-ca4fe90726c8.gif 3694306_l4.jpg screenshot_8568.png Tumblr mc9x35luUE1ripsiao1 1280.jpg Screen Shot 2016-05-23 at 02.11.12.jpg Witches8 t600x453.jpg hqdefaulteva.jpg CtFG9AAVUAAWbrZ.jpg ddCcjYW.gif tumblr_ni4rh7AFG51rp0vkjo1_500.gif giphy-1eva.gif Untitled-design--18-.png screenshot_8572.png Unknowneva.jpeg witches-ugly.jpg screenshot_8571.png The-Grand-High-Witch-the-grand-high-witch-fan-club-10289870-502-464.jpg witches-anjelica-huston-rat-transformation-jim-henson.jpg Grand_High_Witch_as_a_mouse.jpg Category:1990s Category:Brunette Category:Live Action Villainess Category:Witch Category:Child Defeats Villainess Category:Comical Defeat Category:Turned into Object or Animal Category:Humiliated Category:Fate: Deceased Category:Demise: Body Crushed Category:High Heels Category:Stockings or Nylons Category:Defeated By Magic Category:Knee Length Skirts & Dresses Category:Opera Gloves Category:Conspirator Category:Would Hurt a Child Category:Low Cut Top Category:Book Villainess Category:Evil Laugh Category:Man Kills Villainess Category:A Taste Of Her Own Medicine Category:1980s Category:Villainous Reveal Category:Master of Disguise Category:Cape Category:Mass Murderer